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Tripping On Acid Curds In Ornament & Crime

This week, we’re examining another mode in the deep and complicated Ornament & Crime, called Acid Curds. While the module contains a few different chord sequence generating tools, Acid Curds is extremely programmable and can give the user a bit more flexibility than the tonnetz based modes.

Acid Curds is a chord progression sequencer, with four different 1 to 8-step chord progressions that can be chained together end to end to create up to 32 step harmonic sequences. Chord quality, voicing, inversion, root key and octave can be programmed or modulated on each step of the sequence. Sequences are quantized to one of dozens of available scale shapes to produce musical results, with the common Ornament & Crime scale masking and base note functionality.

The progressions can be chained in similar fashion to the sequences in Sequins mode. There are a few different ways to chain them together, including having them play back end to end, triggering the toggle action, or using a CV input to shift the sequence position. Individual sequences can be played back in forward motion, reverse, two different pendulum modes, random and Brownian probability over sequence direction change.

The four outputs on the module are typically going to be routed to four separate oscillators 1V/octave inputs. These oscillators should be tuned to the same frequency before patching from Ornament & Crime, so they can be appropriately detuned to fit the selected chord shape. Trigger input 1 acts as a clock as well as a sample and hold trigger to capture and quantize any incoming CV signal at CV 1. Trigger 2 can be used to advance a step in the current chord sequence, while Trigger 3 will advance to the next progression, and Trigger 4 resets the progressions.

Acid Curds also features an extreme CV assignment page, allowing the four CV inputs to be routed to modulate virtually any parameter in the mode. These include sequence length, chord attributes, transposition and many other critical functions. With CV assigned to transpose as well as control inversion, voicing and quality, the module takes on the form of many other chord based modules.

How are you generating chord sequences in your system? Tell us about it in the comments!